Pursuits: Mad about Truffles

Has the world gone truffle crazy? I began to wonder about the global obsession with truffles in Hong Kong last week.

It began with dinner at the Mandarin Grill, a Michelin-starred restaurant in one of the city’s top hotels. An amuse bouche came with truffle powder.

 

The steak was served with truffle sauce. And even the chocolates were flavoured with black truffle. It was the same at the city’s other Michelin-starred European restaurants. At the Hong Kong outpost of Joel Roubuchon’s L’Atellier chain (which has three Michelin stars), the chef’s famous black truffle tart was on the menu — but more to the point was the profusion of other truffle dishes. And this in a month when truffles are nearing the end of the season and are neither easy to find nor particularly flavourful.

 

   It was the same at oriental restaurants. The Chinese love luxury ingredients. And so they have found ways to incorporate the unfamiliar flavour of truffles into their local cuisines. It is a trend that expensive oriental restaurants all over the world have copied. Go to any Hakkasan, Zuma, Nobu in any capital city and no matter whether they claim the cuisine is Chinese or Japanese, they will find a way to include a dash of truffle into some of the dishes.

 

   Even relatively inexpensive bistros will throw in truffle flavours. A plate of French fries will be described as ‘truffled’. So will a simple dish of macaroni and cheese. There will be no real truffles to be found anywhere in the kitchens of course. The flavours will come from truffle oil, fast becoming the go-to ingredient for unimaginative chefs.

 

   What is going on? How did the world fall in love with truffles?

 

   My guess is that the phenomenon is less than two decades old. Truffles have been around for centuries. But only the French had any great love for them. Go through any collection of Escoffier’s recipes and you will be surprised by the frequency with which truffles turn up. Even to roast a chicken, a truffle may be required. Chefs will be advised to slice a black truffle and to slide the pieces under the chicken skin so that the truffle flavours the flesh of the chicken as it roasts in the oven.

 

   There have always been truffles in other parts of Europe — Spain and Italy for instance. But they have rarely become an integral part of the cuisine. Italians don’t make much of black truffles and the famous white truffle of Alba, available only for three or four months of the year, is only a garnish. Its flavour and aroma are destroyed by cooking so all you can do is slice it over existing dishes like a risotto or a bowl of pasta.

 

   Till the nineties, the French had the truffle to themselves. It was regarded as one of their many eccentricities on par with stinky cheese; jokes were made about how truffles smelt like old socks. If you carried a truffle onto an aeroplane, the strong aroma was likely to turn off other passengers. In some ways, the truffle was the European equivalent of the durian.

 

"Synthetic truffle essence may well be the single most important contributing factor to the current truffle boom. Most truffle products such as truffle oil have never been near a real truffle."

   So what changed? My theory is that there are four reasons for the current truffle explosion. The first is that prosperity made people look for more luxury ingredients. Caviar is hard to come by because of natural scarcity and foie gras production has now increased to the extent that duck liver is cheap and plentiful and cannot really be regarded as a special treat. Truffles on the other hand retain their mystique and epitomise luxury dining.

 

   The second reason is demographic. Outside of western Europe, truffles were regarded as being too smelly to be special. But a new generation of Americans and Asians has grown up without the prejudices of its parents. These are people who love raw fish, like adventurous eating and regard truffles as being alluring rather than off putting.

 

   The third reason is availability. Truffle lore has it that you only get black truffles in France and white truffles in Italy. What’s more, they can’t be cultivated and pop up like magic in mysterious places. This is nonsense. The black truffle can be easily cultivated and there are truffle plantations all over France. Moreover, you find black truffles in many different parts of Europe, not just in France. White truffles, it is true, are harder to cultivate but new sources of supply have emerged.

 

   If you go to buy a black truffle, the chances are that you will be told that it comes from Perigord in France. This is almost certainly a lie. The majority of French black truffles no longer come from Perigord but are cultivated all over France. Italian and Spanish black truffles are routinely passed off as coming from Perigord.

 

   And then there is Eastern Europe. Italians don’t like talking about it but the famous white truffle of Alba is not very different from the not-so-famous white truffle of Croatia. During the communist period, Yugoslavs had no interest in truffles. But now that capitalism has arrived, Eastern Europe has become one of the primary sources for white truffles.

 

   My view is that in ten years’ time, most of the world’s truffles will come from outside Europe. Australia cultivates its own truffles. So does the United States. Plus there is the looming presence of the Chinese. China harvests ton after ton of black truffle. The problem with the Chinese truffle is that while it looks right, it lacks the flavour and the smell of the European truffle. The Chinese reckon that cultivation techniques will improve within the next decade and that their truffle will be indistinguishable from the Perigord version.

 

   Which is not to say that they are willing to wait for a decade. Truffles get their aroma from a chemical compound which can be artificially synthesised from petroleum. Synthetic truffle essence costs virtually nothing to produce and is the fourth reason for the current truffle boom. Unscrupulous marketeers take bland Chinese truffles and inject them with synthetic truffle essence. Sometimes they spray the essence of the surface of each truffle before putting it on the shelves. Many of these truffles end up in France where they are sold alongside genuine European truffles. Unless you know your truffle well, it is quite easy to get conned.

 

   Synthetic truffle essence may well be the single most important contributing factor to the current truffle boom. Most truffle products such as truffle oil have never been near a real truffle. They consist of ordinary oil infused with chemical truffle essence. If you buy truffles in a bottle then there is a good chance that what you are purchasing are Chinese or poor quality truffles which have had their flavour boosted with a dose of synthetic essence.

 

   For me, that is the irony of the truffle boom. When you order a truffle and edamame dumpling at a fancy Chinese dim sum place, you are not really getting any truffle at all. All that the dumpling contains is a shot of the synthetic truffle essence usually in the form of truffle oil. If you don’t know your truffles well, then the smell is a reasonable approximation of the real thing. The more familiar you get with truffles, the less convinced you will be by the synthetic aromas.

 

   But then, I am not sure it matters. I have had chefs tell me that they think twice before using real truffles in their cooking because most diners don’t want the true taste of truffles. They want the strong smell of synthetic truffle essence which they believe is what truffles should smell like.

 

   So yes, the world has gone truffle crazy. But it is not the truffle itself that has caused this madness. It is the idea of the truffle that drives people wild. And all too often that idea is created not in an open field but in an industrial laboratory.